An authoritative biography of the controversial Confederate general, who later embraced Reconstruction and became an outcast in the South.It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.After the war Longstreet moved to New Orleans, where he dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates. His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South's defeat in the Civil War.Although he was one of the highest-ranking Confederate generals, Longstreet has never been commemorated with statues or other memorials in the South because of his postwar actions in rejecting the Lost Cause mythology and urging racial reconciliation. He is being rediscovered in the new age of racial reckoning. Elizabeth Varon's Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) is the first biography in decades and the first to give proper attention to Longstreet's long post-Civil War career. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Born in Ireland in 1848, O’Neill emigrated to the United States soon after the Civil War was over and eventually joined the Chicago Police Department. He rose through the ranks and became Chief of Police in 1901. But in his spare time and after his retirement in 1905, O’Neill devoted himself to collecting Irish traditional music, ultimately publishing several important large collections of the repertory as well as a book that documents Ireland’s musical landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. O’Malley tells O’Neill’s story within multiple, interwoven contexts including British colonialism, Irish nationalism in the United States, American race relations, the standardization in American institutions, and the internal politics of the Chicago Police Department and the city it protected. O’Malley also reveals fascinating connections between O’Neill’s policework and his approach to Irish music.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In the summer of 2022, the little-known leader of a small union became a ‘working-class hero’. Facing down media pundits who thought they could walk all over him, he offered a robust critique of the government and provided workers with an authentic voice. At a time when the Labour Party was unable to articulate a credible alternative to the Tories, Mick Lynch spoke for the working class.Where did Lynch come from? How did he develop the skills and traits that make him such an effective spokesperson and leader? Gregor Gall's biography Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero (Manchester UP, 2024) explores his family and social background and his rise to the top of the RMT union, which culminated in election as General Secretary in 2021. Considering his persona and politics, this book asks what quality singles out Lynch as a working-class hero compared to other union leaders and, more broadly, what leadership means for working people and for the left.If we want better leaders at every level, the case of Mick Lynch holds the key.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Holocaust: A Prelude to Genocide (Bloomsbury, 2022) sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text.Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan's Bloodiest Uprising (Eastbridge Books, 2023) is a gripping and revealing account of the colonial Japanese era in Taiwan, focusing on the Musha Rebellion and its brutal suppression by the Japanese military. The book presents the translated account of Kondō Katsusaburō, a Japanese adventurer who married into an indigenous Taiwanese family. Kondō's journals offer an intimate and personal perspective on the events, though they can also be unreliable and prone to sensationalism.To help readers navigate Kondō's account, Barclay has provided a deeply-researched introduction, extensive notes, and context essential to understanding what really happened during the Musha Rebellion. The book sheds light on the cultural clashes and sporadic violence that characterized Taiwan during this period. Through the writing of Kondō, interpreted and contextualized by Barclay, readers gain insight into the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, and indigenous resistance.The Musha Rebellion was a pivotal moment in the relationship between the indigenous people and the Japanese colonial government. In 1930, after years of oppression, the Seediq people of central Taiwan, led by Mona Rudao, attacked a gathering of Japanese people at a local school, slaughtering over one hundred men, women, and children. The Japanese military responded with overwhelming force, employing tactics including poison gas, artillery, and aerial bombardment to quell the rebellion.Barclay's book offers a fresh and engaging perspective on a tragic chapter in Taiwan's past, and the notes and context provided help readers understand the complexities of the events. The book is an important addition to the growing body of literature on Taiwan's history, and it underscores the power of personal narratives to illuminate broader historical themes. Kondo the Barbarian is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Taiwan, the contradictions of colonialism, and the challenges of interpreting personal accounts of historical events.Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Jana Byars speaks with Catherine Powell-Warren about Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). The conversation begins by examining the ways modern scholars are radically changing our understanding of the position of early modern women one monograph at a time before dialing in on a book that does just that. At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Block is best described as a cultural producer. A member of an influential network in her lifetime, today she remains a largely obscure figure. The socioeconomic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with a male-dominated tradition in art history, have meant that too few stories of women's roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. This book seeks to write Block and her contributions into the art and cultural history of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, highlighting the need for and advantages of a multifaceted approach to research on early modern women. Examining Block's achievements, relationships, and objects reveals a woman who was independent, knowledgeable, self-aware, and not above self-promotion. Though her gender brought few opportunities and many barriers, Agnes Block succeeded in fashioning herself as Flora Batava, a liefhebber at the intersection of art and science.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Since Simon Shuster's November 2023 Time cover story ("Nobody believes in our victory like I do - Nobody"), anyone with an interest in the war in Ukraine has been waiting for his fly-on-the-wall study of command. Finally, The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow, 2024) is out.Born in Moscow but raised in California, Simon Shuster has reported from Russia and Ukraine for 17 years. Before joining Time, he worked in the region for the Moscow Times, Reuters, and AP. He first met Ukraine’s leader and his entourage when Zelensky was running for president in 2019 and built enough trust to be granted sustained wartime access three years later. Based on off-and-on-the-record conversations with the Ukrainian principals – including the president, his wife, their childhood friends, his chief of staff, his defence minister, his national security advisor, and the chief of staff of the armed forces – The Showman provides a unique insight into the conduct of the war from the top.*The authors' book recommendations are Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham (Bantam Press, 2019) and Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick (Viking, 1993).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth century. She secured a steady stream of elite patrons – including popes, queens, grand dukes, and influential cardinals – while male poets and librettists wrote celebratory poetry on her behalf. In addition to her appearances as a soprano on the opera stage, Costa published a remarkable fourteen full-length texts across an expanse of genres: burlesque comedy, drama, equestrian ballet, pastoral opera, amorous letters, lyric poetry, and history.Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (U Toronto Press, 2023) brings together close textual readings of Costa’s numerous publications with archival materials detailing her performance itinerary and social-cultural networks. The book progresses chronologically through her life, geographically along the routes she travelled, and thematically via the genres in which she experimented. Jessica Goethals illuminates how Costa was unafraid to leap over the boundaries of decorum that delimited what women should and did write about. More than merely a literary biography, this book is also a portrait of seventeenth-century courts, their concerns, and their entertainments.Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Today we are going to explore a peculiar volume in the history of Yiddish literature, the Yiddish translation of the Christian bible written by Khaim Yekhiel, “Henry,” Einspruch, titled Der Bris Ḥadoshe, first published in Baltimore in 1941.The saga of Einspruch’s translation of the Christian bible is the subject of a new Yiddish drama, “The Gospel According to Chaim,” written by Mikhl Yashinsky, and recently produced by the New Yiddish Rep theater company in New York.Interviewee: Professor Naomi Seidman is the Jackman Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn’t check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it “two thumbs up.”On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.When they reluctantly agreed to collaborate on a new movie review show with PBS, there was at least as much sparring off-camera as on. No decision—from which films to cover to who would read the lead review to how to pronounce foreign titles—was made without conflict, but their often-antagonistic partnership (which later transformed into genuine friendship) made for great television. In the years that followed, their signature “Two thumbs up!” would become the most trusted critical brand in Hollywood.In Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023), award-winning editor and film critic Matt Singer eavesdrops on their iconic balcony set, detailing their rise from making a few hundred dollars a week on local Chicago PBS to securing multimillion-dollar contracts for a syndicated series (a move that convinced a young local host named Oprah Winfrey to do the same). Their partnership was cut short when Gene Siskel passed away in February of 1999 after a battle with brain cancer that he’d kept secret from everyone outside his immediate family—including Roger Ebert, who never got to say goodbye to his longtime partner. But their influence on in the way we talk about (and think about) movies continues to this day.Matt Singer is the editor and film critic of ScreenCrush and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. He won a Webby Award for his work on the Independent Film Channel’s website. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography